What's Good For Mayor Tom and the DART Board Is Bad for Dallas

Your city council today appointed Dr. Claude R. Williams Jr. to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit board -- which means, of course, no Joyce Foreman, the woman Mayor Tom Leppert and Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway got kicked off the board when this mess all started. Council member Mitchell Rasansky said he was voting against Foreman because he had received some kind of letter or memo from the mayor informing him that Foreman had a conflict of interest.

I know what this is about. Foreman used to have a contract with the Center for the Performing Arts to handle minority contracting. Her contract was with the private foundation that will run the center, not with the city. And, anyway, it was voided a year ago. So the letter Rasansky says he saw was a last-minute smear based on bad information.

The mayor said he didn’t know anything about the letter that Rasansky attributed to him.

This begins to take on a very unfortunate smell when you recall that the mayor’s favorite person on the DART board, the late Lynn Flint Shaw, was under investigation for forgery of an official letter at the time of her death last March.

Why do things get shady whenever Leppert and Caraway coalesce around DART board matters? Is anybody going to explain what letter Rasansky saw and from whom it came? I have placed a call to Rasansky, but he’s still in the meeting.

As for the appointment … my head hurts. No, my heart hurts. Leppert, Caraway and Dr. Elba Garcia have now contrived to fill all of the available Dallas seats on the DART board with empty suits and worse. We are really screwed. This is bad for Dallas as a whole. It’s even bad for Dallas as a hole. --Jim Schutze